Changing culture, one gamerscore at a time.

Okay, before we start, I think I need to nerd out for a paragraph or two, here.

I’m a massive fantasy nerd. In my lifetime, I’ve absorbed huge swathes of swashbuckling elves and evil wizards, I’ve painted little mages and sent them into battle, and I’ve even dressed up as a mythic fantasy warrior and charged around for a weekend smacking people around with a fake sword. In short, I absolutely love fantasy, though I’ll say now (naysayers can moan, but it’s true), that Lord of the Rings is not really what you’re going to get from mainstream fantasy, in the same sense Harry Potter isn’t really a true fantasy wizard.

There are a few tenets of fantasy that are vital to creating a successful legion of fans who will, often, put overweight people in leather armour whenever you’re signing their novels:

• A back-story stretching thousands of years, preferably with at least one race who was “there when the (insert creator-race here) were first beginning their work.” I’m talking races, politics, great wars you’ll only hear about in whispered discussions in dark taverns over a mug of ale from a dwarf with more scars than skin.
• A world in which everything is possible, geographically. I’m talking about dwarven mine-fortresses, lava and daemon-filled wastelands, lush, verdant forests and tiring, endless desert. Everything must be covered, and at great length, though you’re welcome to take the time, as most fantasy novels barely leave the starting town for eight hundred pages.
• A strong sense of factions – I’ll give an example. Dwarves are not all linked, generally, by the fact they’re all small, hyper-masculine and extremely pissed off. There are many different types of dwarf, and it’s important to establish that not everyone in your novel/fan-fiction/game/film/glue-and-macaroni sculpture is simply a cookie-cutter stereotype with nothing to individualise them whatsoever. Strong characters need to break the mould, and rebel against the constraints set upon them by men like Tolkien, in which every dwarf is angry, ridiculously noble and hiding some kind of secret pain. That’s not fantasy, that’s a Hatebreed concert.
• I like dwarves, have you noticed?

Now, to look at Dragon Age’s character creation screen, we’re presented with a wealth of options, but not so many as to spoil the idea of fun and logically-contained originality for the player. Dwarves (hah!) can be commoners or nobles, humans can be of similar varying backgrounds, and most interestingly, elves are either rebels or slaves. Chew on that, Legolas.

I think this is an important idea, and one they’ve built on since Mass Effect. In ME you were given the ability to give your Commander Shepherd one of three different backgrounds, and within that one of three defining moments in his military career. The six bases for the avatar you’d be playing for a long time (and at my girlfriend’s last count, over 100 hours) are simple. The son of a Navy couple, bathed in blood defending a strategic objective from a horde of oncoming foes whilst his friends lay dead and wounded. An Earth-born urchin with no future save enlisting, earning his recognition in the galaxy as a ruthless war-hero who would ignore civilian casualties to take out the enemy. Many options, and they all contribute to certain missions cropping up, certain reactions from those aware of Shepherd’s reputation.

Bioware have built on this idea in DA by not only giving you six different choices, but ensuring the first two hours or more are completely based on whose mind you choose to immerse yourself in for the next fifty-plus hours. I think it’s a great step forward for the RPG genre – remember, WoW fans, how you’d start a new character simply to immerse yourself in the one-to-ten starting zones? It’s essentially a very similar thing with DA, and I think it’ll be a massive success.

I will nitpick about the graphics, and that’s simply because I don’t think it fits the genre. Good science fiction, or in the case of ME, amazing science fiction, is all about believable, mature conversation about topics NASA would kill children to put into active use. The animation for these conversations in-game are what make them so effective, as no one is in any way being melodramatic or putting too much physical emphasis on their lines and more lines of dialogue.

In fantasy, I’m not so sure I can see this working. Fantasy is William Shakespeare to science fiction’s August Strindberg – the melodrama serves the universe in which the fiction is set. Dwarves are angry, Elves are arrogant, and humans are, generally, bumbling idiots but hold a few exceptions that amount to either suave anti-heroes or comedic relief. However, the conversations in the trailer still look fairly Bioware-static, and I’m worried they won’t be able to convey the stage-presence style of the dialogue that, by the look of it, remains very true to the genre in which the title is set.

As for the skill system? It’s WoW meets Mass Effect, and I couldn’t be happier with it. Specialise in one or two handed weapons, blocking, agility, tanking… and this is just for the Warrior class. Obviously, this is never going to become a multiplayer game, and it’s always a shame to see a three-man RPG suffer like this, especially if it’s on the PC as well. However, we said this initially about Too Human, and the eventual multiplayer in that case was abysmal.

The squad system has taken some seriously clever cues from the best RPG combat mechanic, in my opinion, of all time: the gambit system from FFXII. The gambit system, for those who never played FFXII, was a simple set of instructions for your allies that were all conditional: use potions when low on health, use magic until out of mana, then use a mana pot and keep on blastin’, and so on. The only major difference between the two was you had to unlock gambit options in Square’s epic RPG, and here it’s all up to you from the word go. This works very well in a game where you’d really not feel like managing the minutiae of your squadmate’s spells if you’ve chosen a physically-focused character for a reason.

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The game comes out on November 6th in Europe, and I can’t wait to stick up an in-depth review here on FTGG, though you’re looking at Christmas, earliest: if it’s being done for my enjoyment, you’ll know I’ll have only touched the review once I’ve geeked out and done every single possible thing in the game. Most reviewers will be skipping a fair bit of content, as it’s ridiculous for someone to have to write a thousand words while compressing down fifty-plus hours of gameplay, especially in the space of a week before the article due date. There are some games I’m so glad I played, rather than reviewed. This will be one of them.